The Great Global Warming Swindle --- An Environmentalist Perspective

In looking for information on the role carbon dioxide plays in atmospheric global warming, I came across this exchange. I'm saving it for future reference. It does help explain the political motivations of people pushing the belief that man is causing global warming.
Peter

from: http://myblog.michaelpbyron.com/comments/atom.aspx

Friday, May 04, 2007, 2:04:44 PM Michael Byron
I find it interesting that the "global warming is a fraud" meme has so thoroughly infected a zelous, though mostly sincere minority. Connecting the dots, I now surmise that much of this has been caused by a BBC documentary entitled "The Great Global Warming Swindle." It is available online at:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4520665474899458831&q=global+swindle+warming

I note that it is about 75 minutes in length. This documentary purports to "reveal" the "truth" about global warming--namely that it is a fraud perpertrated upon the public by scheming elites etc. I was first alerted to in on March 13th when I recieved a somewhat worried e-mail from the lady who ran for Congress for the Democrats here in the CA-49th CD in '06. (I was the nominee in '04). She stated:
So far 2two intelligent & progressive people have sent me the link to this video. It’s long and it’s disturbing because I think it’s a bunch of disinformation and I don’t believe a word of it – but belief is not a reasonable standard for determining if something is or is not true. So PLEASE give me facts that poke holes in this or tell me it could be correct. (geez, I hope you don’t tell me that – not because I wouldn’t be delighted to hear that we can stop worrying about global warming, but because I would hate to think the vast majority of INTELLIGENT people I know have been so completely duped – who can we trust anymore?)

If my gut instinct is correct and this is a con job to destroy the environmental movement, then we have some major damage control to start doing right away because this could collapse the entire effort to get global warming under control -- and it’s spreading. The confusion and self-doubt this movie could spawn will hurt of not just the environmental movement but the progressive movement as well. Her e-mail elicited a reply from another correspondent who stated that:
Jeeni,

The right-wing blogosphere has been abuzz with the crap for a few weeks now. Lacking any credible evidence to deal with the fact of global warming, they have taken the attack to the messenger. This issue has an incredible consensus amount serious scientists and nobody has presented any evidence to the contrary. What the authors of this movie call “serious concerns” is generally not about the fact of global warming, but about some of the mechanisms and models… this is a far cry from discounting global warming. Remember, I can go out and find a fair number of “scientists” who think the world is only 6,000 years old. A fairly large percentage of the population still thinks the world is flat…

Personally, I think that up until fairly recently, there has been a fair amount of dissention about the amount of the warming caused by humans verses what is natural causes. But most of this has disappeared with the development of new computer models in the last few years. Lawrence Livermore’s atmospheric models clearly show how we can differentiate between “natural” effects and “human” effects. For those of you really into the technical, there is a really good paper by Lawrence Livermore Labs showing the recent computer models: http://www.llnl.gov/str/March04/pdfs/03_04.2.pdf(by the way… that’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory… probably the smartest people on the planet…

This is part of a very well planned and executed attack on the Goracle… Law school 101, when you don’t have the facts on your side, attack the messenger. Do enough damage to the messenger and people will generally forget about the facts…
Mark [rest of name witheld to protect privacy]I replied to this post saying:
Jeeni,

You can find detailed analysis and rebuttal to this disinformation piece at: http://coinet.org.uk/information/swindleresponse.

Additional rebuttal of another part of this disinformation campaign can be found here: http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0314-30.htm

Basically, because most people are unable to understand the deeper scientific realities involved, substituting one plausible sounding story for the actual scientific one is enough to at least created doubt and uncertainty.

On the one hand you have essentially all of the worlds scientists as evidenced by the just released 4th report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (see: http://www.ipcc.ch/SPM2feb07.pdf). On the other you have a handful of people and well a LOT of industry money as my links above will demonstrate.

Deliberate misinformation, pure and simple.

Best,

Mike Byron PhD,
Author of Infinity’s Rainbow: the Politics of Energy, Climate and Globalization.
http://www.michaelpbyron.com/ The mention of the "hockey puck graph being discredited" in previous posts is a dead giveaway of the video's influence. This can be proved conclusively by googling "hockey puck graph discredited" and perusing the results of the search.I note that this "documentary" is itself thouroughly discredited. However, I have provided the link to it for any interested parties to see it for themselves. I've also provided several debunking links about it. As always, you the reader must decide for yourselves.The "beauty" of this strategy is to utilize those who are most distrustfull of the corporatocracy to do therier bidding in the name of opposing them! Karl Rove would smile at this. As I do not have time to sit here and endlessly reply to whoever wants to try to spread this corporate sponsored disinformation meme, I must leave it at that. As always, let the reader decide on the basis of facts and rational thinking for him/her self. I have not rejected any anti-global warming post and have provided a link to the source of the misinformation in this post. That is enough for this topic. On to the next!Mike Byron
Comment on Misunderstanding Global Warming: Alexander Cockburn versus Reality.